(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a manufacturing method of immune killer cells, and particularly to a medical composite that applies immune killer cells to suppress tumors.
(b) Description of the Prior Art
Present researches on the subject of immune therapies for cancer treatment include injections of cytokines such as interferon or interleukin to enhance the anti-cancer effect by stimulating immunity directly. However, cytokines generally have significant side effects. For example, a cytokine including interferon and interleukin will usually induce symptoms similar to a flu and cause fever, chill, tiredness and digestive tract problems, and a patient's blood pressure may also be affected. In general, the side effect caused by interleukin-2 (IL-2) is more seriously, and doctors have to observe their patients carefully during treatment process. Although the injection of cytokines has brought cancer treatment a ray of hope, yet it is usually not recognized as a totally feasible solution.
In addition to the injection of cytokines, the present immune therapies also include cancer vaccine therapy which may be able to improve immunity, but a cancer patient's immune system is suppressed, and the effect of the treatment remains to be seen. Among the present immune therapies, the immune cell therapy technique should be a quicker and more effective one. The so-called immune cell therapy technique refers to the therapy that extracts white blood cells from a patient for culturing and proliferating a large quantity of lymphokine activate killer (LAK) cells, cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) cells or natural killer (NK) cells, and then infuses these cells back into the patient's body to provide an anti-cancer effect.
Since cells such as NK cells and CTL cells (and LAK cells are not a normal group which exists in the human body, but they are cells reproduced in a large quantity after the culture of CTL cells in a high concentration of CTL) with the capability of killing cancer cells which exist in the human body, therefore the CTL cells and NK cells in human body come with a limited quantity and a suppressed specific release, and immunologists have been trying for a long time to culture a large quantity of these cells by cytokine outside human bodies, and then injecting the cells back into human bodies to improve the patients' anticancer specific release. This method has the advantage of achieving a quick result without any exclusion (because the cells are obtained from the patients themselves. Since it is necessary to remove the cytokine before the injection of cells takes place, there will be no side effect of the cytokine. The keys of this method include proliferating sufficient cells and providing an appropriate specific release to maximize the anti-cancer effect. However, this method has not been used extensively in clinical applications, mainly due to the bottlenecks on the proliferation of a large quantity of the cells and the improvement of the specific release of the proliferated cells.
In the culture process of in vitro immune cells, antibody proteins of animals are generally used as a stimulant, and such arrangement may cause the infection of zoonotic diseases and jeopardize the health and even the life of the patients. For example, as disclosed in P.R.C. Pat. No. ZL 200310109565.5, two types of mitogen-associated specific release cells including phytohemagglutinin (PHA) and Anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody (anti-CD3 mAb) are used for improving the strength of stimulating the cells to enhance the proliferation capability of the in vitro cells. However, the source of using anti-CD3 mAb generally comes from mouse experiments, and the genes of mice and human beings are very close, so that it is difficult to avoid the infection of zoonotic diseases (or common diseases between mice and men that may jeopardize human health and life).